Friday, July 18, 2008

I'm With Mark Levin   [Peter Robinson]

Mark Levin tells us that David Brooks can write as he does only by ignoring “100 years and more of government intervention.”   I'd add that David likewise ignores a great mass of hugely important thought. 

Milton Friedman argued that government spending will always prove pernicious for the simple but profound reason that “nobody spends somebody else’s money as well as he spends his own.”  Has Brooks ever refuted Friedman?  No.  He writes instead as if Friedman had simply never existed.  Hayek argued that government intervention in the economy will always prove grossly inefficient because government planners can never acquire all the information they’d need to do a good job of allocating resources.  The price mechanism, Hayek argued—joined by Friedman, and George Stigler, and Gary Becker, and James Buchanan, just to name five scholars whose thought proved impressive enough to win them the Nobel Prize for economics—disperses knowledge throughout the marketplace in a way that government activity simply cannot.  Does David attempt to refute Hayek?  No.  Once again, he simply ignores the man.  

Here and elsewhere, David writes as if the policies of Ronald Reagan (and Margaret Thatcher) were mere reactions or spasms, not what they actually were; which was, of course, the political expression of more than half a century of painstaking observation, inquiry, and debate—in other words, of intellectual progress.  David has a fine mind, Lord knows, and he writes gorgeously.  But he wants to dumb us down—to insist that we know less than we do.  And there’s nothing conservative—or, for that matter, progressive—about that.

07/18 11:52 AMShare